You get what you want: A note on the economics of bad news

Jill McCluskey, Johan Swinnen and Thijs Vandemoortele ()

Information Economics and Policy, 2015, vol. 30, issue C, 1-5

Abstract: We develop a simple theoretical model that explains the slant towards negative coverage in news media. In a framework where news is informative and consumers are risk averse, diminishing marginal utility implies that information about a negative income shock is more valuable than information about a positive shock, which leads to disproportionate reporting of bad news.

Keywords: Media; Bias; Slant; Negative news coverage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167624514000444
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:iepoli:v:30:y:2015:i:c:p:1-5

DOI: 10.1016/j.infoecopol.2014.10.003

Access Statistics for this article

Information Economics and Policy is currently edited by D. Waterman

More articles in Information Economics and Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().